How do revision and editing practices fit in writing workshop?
Writing Workshop
Mini-Lesson: powerful endings
Endings matter! Here are some options from Ralph Fletcher's book, Live Writing:
Catch your reader off guard with humor
Try a circular ending to tie the piece together
Surprise your reader
End with emotion (but it doesn't have to be complicated!)
Trust your reader: don't leave them with something obvious
Don't try to make your ending do too much
Leave a lasting impression
Make a graceful exit
Try a memorable quote or statement that will linger
And a few more by Barry Lane: Essay endings don't have to be bun bottoms:
End with a snapshot
So now I wonder...
Something that strikes you as most puzzling
So now I think…
What I wish I could find out now from…
How an experience led to a belief (if that had not happened, how would you know it?
Writing Time
Class time
Revisiting Conferring
Revision & Editing: what's the difference?
Revisiting 6-Traits
Barry Lane’s After the End: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision)
Ralph Fletcher
¨ Cross out THE END and write five unanswered questions and turn the most compelling one into a new lead.
¨ Change the beginning
¨ Divide your piece into chapters
¨ Break a large piece into chunks or chapters
¨ Insert a snapshot.
¨ Change the ending
¨ Insert a thoughtshot.
¨ Add a section (layering)
¨ Insert some dialogue or cut out uninteresting dialogue.
¨ Change the tone
¨ Write from a different point of view.
¨ Change the point of view
¨ Write in a different genre.
¨ Change the genre
¨ Cut writing into paragraphs. Keep the best ones; throw away the rest. Write the piece again, building on the parts you kept.
¨ Focus on one part
¨ Explode the moment.
¨ Slow down the “hot spot”
¨ Replace ineffective dialogue with snapshots and thoughtshots.
¨ Cut anything.
¨ Delete a section (pruning)
¨ Draw illustrations and see if you can add more detail based on what you draw.
¨ Read the piece out loud and listen to your voice. Ask what you can do to change the parts you don’t like.
Response Groups Katie Wood Ray says that the process of revising should include reading aloud in order to hear the "problems" in writing; using author's craft to make the writing better; reading our work aloud to our response groups; fixing the things that the response group didn't understand; and re-seeing our beginnings and endings in order to get our readers interested and thinking.
Enjoy your break...but bring back a list of twenty things (just the ordinary) that happened throughout the week, or even a day or two . Note that Multi-genre project drafts are due on March 18!
How do revision and editing practices fit in writing workshop?
Writing Workshop
Mini-Lesson: powerful endings
Endings matter! Here are some options from Ralph Fletcher's book, Live Writing:
And a few more by Barry Lane: Essay endings don't have to be bun bottoms:
- End with a snapshot
- So now I wonder...
- Something that strikes you as most puzzling
- So now I think…
- What I wish I could find out now from…
- How an experience led to a belief (if that had not happened, how would you know it?
Writing TimeClass time
Revisiting Conferring
Revision & Editing: what's the difference?
Revisiting 6-TraitsResponse Groups
Katie Wood Ray says that the process of revising should include reading aloud in order to hear the "problems" in writing; using author's craft to make the writing better; reading our work aloud to our response groups; fixing the things that the response group didn't understand; and re-seeing our beginnings and endings in order to get our readers interested and thinking.
Jeff Anderson , The Write Guy
Homework
Enjoy your break...but bring back a list of twenty things (just the ordinary) that happened throughout the week, or even a day or two . Note that Multi-genre project drafts are due on March 18!